[Illustration: A GENERAL STRIKE ON DERBY DAY.
FROM OUR GALLERY OF INCONCEIVABLE HORRORS.]
"For Sale, Hupmobile Car (1916 model), saloon body, self starter, electric light, lory on ground floor, 3 bedrooms, bathroom seater, with 2 extra chairs."--_Provincial Paper_.
"Mr. ---- is forty-six and a man of business. He is chairman of the City Lands Committee, and a member of the Corporation. These things are not good training for championship lawn-tennis."--_Evening Paper_.
This applies more especially, of course, to the Corporation.
"The Duchess still looks quite a girl, and so does the Duke, particularly now that he has shaved off his tiny moustache."--_Weekly Paper_.
The Duke's motto: "Put me among the girls."
Trench-foot, shell-shock and the other well-known by-products of war on the Western Front always got the bulk of medical notice, while our rarer Macedonian efforts remained neglected. My friend McTurtle has nervous prostration, with violent paroxysms at the mention of leave or demobilization, and the medical profession can only classify him as "N. Y. D., or Not Yet Diagnosed (malignant)."
McTurtle is a Staff-officer. A famous Atlantic liner dumped him at Salonica in 1915, and when the first infantrymen panted through the town in search of non-existent billets McTurtle was to be seen in the window of a villa giving bird-seed to his canary. At Salonica it is not considered good form to ask openly what a Staff-officer's job is, but he allowed friends to gather that he had an indirect connection with that fine old regiment, the Macedonian Labour Corps.
After some time (about three decorations and a mention in despatches, as McTurtle measured time) the overland leave route was opened, and the far-reaching shadow of war plunged suddenly across McTurtle's unlikely threshold. He was called upon, like many another harmless Staff-officer, to give up his simple comforts and to face hardship and suffering for a scrap of paper (authorising him to travel to Manchester). At first McTurtle was content to let the younger men of the Base make a stand against the aggression of the front line. Being the only support of an aged Colonel and no mere youth, he left it to the reckless A.P.M.'s, the dashing Camp Commandants and the carefree dare-devil Field-Cashiers to repel the infantry and gunners. But his conscience was uneasy, and indeed his apparent lack of proper feeling was commented upon by others. Once an A.D.C. handed him a white feather in the Rue Venizelos.